grub won't respond to my keyboard

[jw1496]

I have just allowed my ubuntu 11.10 system to carry out updates without, I must admit, looking carefully to see what they were. Update manager wanted a reboot but on restarting I saw an error message stating that the disc with /tmp was not present. Not sure of the sequence of events after this - its been a bad day! I rebooted with the on/off switch and entered the bios. Everything seemed OK both hard drives were present and correct (OS is on an SSD, my documents are stored on a conventional hard drive). Now if I try to reboot GRUB comes up but does not respond if I try to use the keyboard to select any option. I have tried booting from two distro cds but neither of these will respond to the keyboard. I have tried a second keyboard and I have tried plugging this via an adapter into the PS2 port.

Any suggestions?

[jw1496]

A small update...
I tried boot-repair-disk (http://sourceforge.net/projects/boot-repair-cd/files/) which I found through this forum. Unfortunately since it does not automatically boot I am unable to start it because it requires keyboard input!

[Bashing-om]

Hello jw1496;

Let's proceed with baby steps to find our where we are at.

1. Can you boot the install cd => try ubuntu ...does keyboard respond ?
2. From your normal install can you boot into recovery mode ?


kind regards <==BDQ

[jw1496]

Hi,

Thanks for your help.

I have just found a solution. I don't know how or why but in the BIOS mouse and keyboard USB support was disabled. (MB is a gigabyte GA-M61SME-S2 if anybody cares). I enabled it and my keyboard was able to work in GRUB and then I was able to boot successfully.

So I think we can mark this solved.